Hol@

I´m sitting in Santiago, Chile. In a hostel on the fifth story of a building with celing decorations that look like hairy fingernails and sharpied names on the walls. But I like it. I love the hostel life. Sleeping next to someone who might live across the world from you. I tried all three computers here, one of which didn´t have a mouse. You would think I would know how to use the ¨at¨ symbol on a Spanish keyboard by now... Thank you Wikipedia for your History of At Symbols article to copy and paste from. I also don´t have spell check. And every time I try to do an apostrophe, I somehow type this symbol {. So here we go.

Santiago, Chile

Machu Picchu, Peru. We walked to the city square at five in the morning to find that the rest of the group had hired porters. I felt like quite the man hiking Dead Woman´s Pass with my life on my back. I only brought one other pair of clothes. Although it saved my back some weight, it also meant that I was in a continual state of dampness as I quickly found that my Scotchguarded windbreaker did not act as a raincoat. But there were llamas and waterfalls and ruins to discover. There was Spanish to say and fruit to try. And we made it. With strong legs and dirty hair. It was like opening a pop-up story book to see my history book come alive like that. That would be a nice job. Designing pop up books. I also think creating the names of paint colors would be nice. Who in the world decides what is olive green verses sage green?

Maccu Picchu, Peru

I spent Christmas in Cusco, Peru. What a sweet town. It reminded me of a mountain ski town. With the cold clouds and cobblestone streets. People had goats in their arms and trinkets to sell. I came across an all natural sandwich and smoothie shop that had smoothies that mixed papaya and plantains and beer and things. The blinking Christmas llamas placed on the sides of the roads added to the feel too. I got myself a dark ice blue North Face water proof jacket for the equivalent of thirty American dollars. My Christmas dinner was an omlette in the upstairs of a building with a dog looking at me from the opposite side of the glass door. Sara and Alex had falafel there after their feast of guinea pig and alpaca for lunch.

Cusco, Peru

We flew into Lima, Peru the next day. Our city tour was interesting. Our guide showed us where to get forged documents and where the best Piscos and police stations and cathedrals were. He let me take a picture on a metal llama in a public park and we hopped the fence as he yelled to sprint so as not to be hit while we jaywalked. More like jayran. Lima reminded me a lot of Spain. With beautiful arcitecture and metal statues of men on horses. He pointed out on one statue the ¨Llama of Liberty¨that was sitting on a woman´s head. We roomed with Aussies in our hostel and woke up at five to hop the border to Santiago, Chile. Before I fell asleep to party music and soft breathing I read this, and then wrote it down with my borrowed black ink pen in my water stained red mole skin notebook:

Lima, Peru

Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the end of what was passing away. But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, beause only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord{s glory, are being transformed into His image with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:12-18)

So here I am. Realizing that I could do all the travelling in the world but if I have a veil over my heart none of this will be revealed in completion. It´s like mining gold from the river with my fingers. I´d get the experiences, but so much would missed. People think freedom is being released from a grasp, but I believe freedom is choosing to be held by God. He can´t lift a veil if you´re running away. I´m far from perfect. I run away much to often for way too long. I make mistakes with a hole-y heart. But I´ve found that however far I think I´ve run, God is waiting one step behind me. I don´t deserve any of this. But it´s here. And I want that freedom.

Bolivia and Peppermint

I'm in Bolivia at 11,000 feet in La Paz, the highest city in South America. I'm pecking out this post with my thumbs on a phone with a thumping heart and pressured lungs. It's definitely evident I've lived at sea level my whole life. My roommate smells like peppermint because of her herbal remedies and I like it a lot. I really like peppermint. Especially peppermint gum or candy canes. And I like Christmas. 

I want to thank Sergio for all of this. For being able to stay with his family for the entire week. There is a poster of him on the wall watching over us while we sleep. He's a celebrity here in La Paz. Even our taxi driver knew him. He plays guitar like I would want to in my dreams. He played for us over Skype and his fingers seemed to connect with the neck like they had been born together. His friends took us to a market at night. We went in a random ally up two flights of stairs to an antique bar with carved little devils and old dusty typewriters and beautiful wooden ceiling to drink maté and sweet corn drinks called Api. They laughed at our Spanish and we laughed at their stories. We drove without seatbelts and rapped to M&M and listened to German rock music. His family speaks their Spanish slowly for us and they have green curtains and a golden dog with a timid little nose and short stubby legs and a happy tail. They give us food like plantains and chicken and quinoa soup and drive us places like Lake Titicaca. I learned about that lake in my history class this semester. It's like the Israel of South America, and Israel means a lot to me. All the food is organic. Their meat, milk, fruit... Everything here is what I would imagine South America to be like. The traditional dress... The elderly ladies wear skirts to their ankles and shawls and top hats like the mad hatter in Alice in Wonderland. There are sweaters and gloves and socks made from alpaca hair. I purchased green socks with a yellow and red pattern and white llamas dancing around the ankles for the equivalent of three American dollars. The people's faces are beautiful too. You can tell this country is much less touched by European and United States influence. I'm one of the only blondes I've seen here and by the way they stare I feel the most out of place that I ever have in my life. But I like it. I like how they have remained their own. They even built their town hall clock to tick backwards to prove their own identity.

I tried to journal the other day. I have a little red moleskin journal that can bend in my hands. I'm bad at journaling. All I talk about are what color the walls are and the comparisons between people and cotton candy and saints. I tend to skip over the big pictures. I think in details. I think in the wrinkle lines on lips and how the sun can make the solid green curtains ten different shades of the same green. It overwhelms me sometimes. But it is good. It's good to pick up life and switch it around and make it tick backwards. It's good to remember the people in airports who let you borrow pens and the ones that tell you about journalism and silver mines. I think it's good to be who you are. 

I don't know how to end this post. So, here's un beso to you and another to the start of six weeks traveling South America.

Arial View of La Paz on a gondola-like transportation system called the Teleferico.

A lady selling fruit in Copacabana, a town by Lake Titicaca.

Lake Titicaca in the flesh.

Beige

I've blogged at least once a month since January. It makes me quiver like those Mickey Mouse styrofoam shapes on the ends of a car antennas to see those little electronic satisfactions. They're far from perfect, or even professional. They're actually quite odd a lot of the time. But when I see them I feel like I make the perfect snowball or I'm holding a full tube of toothpaste... or I've just opened one of those new jars of peanut butter... the Skippy smooth kind of peanut butter.

But then I realized that I haven't blogged for two months. I'll be clique and say that these past two months have felt like the craziest times of my life. It's like the first squeeze of toothpaste or a knife to that utopian peanut butter. A bit of my heart turned black at the sight of it. Or beige. I tend to be inspired to write when I hear good, new music. And I did. From an Irish lady with red hair and bangs sharply angled across her forehead. My host madré told me that the word for bangs in Spanish is el pelo golpea and I laughed because saying it made my tongue shiver. The Irish bang lady told me to look up Fat White Family and to not watch the music videos. So I did, and now I'm in love with the song Beige and I feel tastefully hipster because it's not even on Google or YouTube (Spotify is my haven). I was also trying to be hipster and not go to Starbucks, but, who are we kidding. Being able to say frappuccino in a Spanish accent has to count for something. I guess need to work on that because I usually just get my coffee black.

Here's a pic of me in Mendoza cause I thought I should put at least one.

I've been watching all of my friends' travel blogs develop, and I love them. With their stories and pictures. With the documentation that I know I'll regret if I don't upkeep too. So I started this blog post with the intention of catching up with myself, which I've realized, in all actuality, is an impossible task. But all I really want to talk about is the Hipodrome, and comparatively, it's not even a big event. I live near a horse track and I decided to take a walk in my aqua blue converse and my horizontally pinstriped shirt rolled up to the elbows. And then I started to pass those people you would imagine would have little circular eye glasses slid three feet down their nose and long spindly legs with chubby little stomachs and vertical pinstripes on their coats. They didn't really look like that, but I did overhear a conversation in a British accent, which was really strange for me in Argentina. So I decided to climb the fence, but I stopped half up, clinging to the metal bars and looking wistfully through them. It was like the back stage of a theater, except instead of costumes there was the closeness of horses' rippling muscles and the smell of the creaking saddles. Dust particles ensured themselves in my eyelashes and I watched the jockey's sweat move to the procession of hoofs thudding on the packed dirt like a far-off heartbeat.

Words. There's some great ones like avuncular in Jack White's song Black Bat Licorice. It has a Latin root and means pertaining to, or a characteristic of an uncle. I think this is my second time referencing him in my blog, but, it's Jack White. There are the words that I used to say over and over until they sounded like mush. Like Fransisco or refrigerator. But I feel so misunderstood when I use words. I think it's because we try to make our thoughts fit the accepted standard of language rather than letting the thoughts choose which words should represent them. A lot of times I feel like the way we use words lowers the standard of what constitutes a thought, conforming it to a mold instead of finding words capable of representing it. I think we are letting language shape our thoughts instead of shaping the language around our ideas. This unconsciously produces a habit, which is accepted as academic English. I think our modern goal is the problem, the mentality we have of just finishing the paper or doing the minimum. So, instead of making an effort to fight for words, I settle and am even encouraged to fall into the mold of things that just sound nice.

Here's an excerpt from old school Ecclesiastes from the Bible:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. 

And here's a version in "modern English" from Orwell:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

However, Orwell's text would be the one praised for its academic level. Yeesh. I like the quote by Paulo Freire, “words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.” It's rather ironic because later in the same paper he falls straight into the word trap that he had just condemned. I think it's because we need to use words to convey this idea of how not to use words. Like in Jefferson's words (on a a different topic, unless you see words as slavery, which I guess they kind of are), "a necessary evil."

I say all this to say two things:

First, the Bible is simply timeless. There aren't many, and arguably, there aren't ANY books with as much class as the Bible. Class like cigar eating lobster with a silk handkerchief and a patterned bow tie. Even if you don't agree with it, it's just such a beautiful piece of literature. Please read it. Or at least a book in its entirety (start with Isaiah or Luke... a lot of Numbers and Chronicles are exactly what they sound like). 

Second, I could, should, and probably will recount all of my travels in the past few months. But I need to write them when the words can describe what I want to say. My blog posts are random. And scattered. With sentence fragments and misplaced commas... and pretty cheesy at times. But I try my hardest to make my words say what I mean. Sometimes, as a person, I am random and cheesy and scattered with misplaced thoughts and fragments. But I want my words to leak with authenticity, and if those are the elements that comprise me at that time, I think those words can be valuable because I think that the words people omit in their most vulnerable form reflect a lot of their character. I want my words to be written in relevance to the Bible, the most authentic and real script that I know, even if they don't directly reference it. Because the closer I can write to the bare bone truth of life and emotion, the closer I am to becoming what I want my words say. Like Colossians 3:23, "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord." I just want my words to convey things in their purity, even if they contain a run-on sentence or a misplaced comma.